The Fall of the House of Zeus (33 page)

“The motherfucker never called me back.”

    
A half hour later, Balducci was in Lackey’s office. The judge observed that his visitor was “traveling mighty early this morning.”

“Oh, man,” Balducci said, “I got things rolling, rocking and rolling.” He reported that Patterson was still sore from surgery. “He’s being kind of a baby about it. I think he’s playing up his sympathy thing.” He said he had told Patterson “you better get your big ass up and rolling” because they had an important black-tie dinner to attend in Washington
that weekend. It was an event where they planned to meet with members of the Biden family to try to enlist a prominent black minister from Boston, Charles Stith, as an associate of their firm. Stith had served as ambassador to Tanzania during the Clinton administration.

After more small talk, Lackey sighed deeply and opened the unpleasant subject. “Let me tell you,” he said, “I don’t want a nickel of your money, Tim.”

“I know that, Judge.”

“And if this is not coming back to you, if it’s not Mr. Scruggs’s money, I don’t want a nickel of it because it’s not gonna do Tim any good, and he’s the one that I’m trying to help.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Balducci told him. “All that’s taken care of.”

Lackey sighed again. “This is my first trip, and I know you think I’m a complete horse’s ass.”

“Absolutely not!” Balducci interjected.

“And I feel lower than whale shit, to tell you the truth,” the judge continued.

“I’m just glad I’m in a position to help you, Judge,” Balducci said and whispered conspiratorially, “This is between me and you—and just between me and you. There ain’t another soul in the world that knows about this. Okay? And this is taken care of.”

Lackey seemed bothered about the note of confidentiality, the absence of Scruggs’s name in the agreement with Balducci. So Lackey said, “I would think Mr. Scruggs would have to know something.”

“Here’s how it works,” Balducci replied, taking satisfaction in lecturing his mentor on the unsavory ways of the world. “Just so you’ll have some understanding of how it works, there will come a time where I’ll just sit him down in private and tell him that I solved a problem for him. That he had a problem that needed solving, and that he needs to take care of the problem that I solved for him. That’s how that’ll work. So don’t worry about any of this.”

“All right,” Lackey said. But he still had concerns. “There’s one other thing that I’ve heard about over the years, that when a substantial amount of cash is withdrawn, you have to sign …”

“This money didn’t come from a bank,” Balducci said. “Judge, I’ve been around long enough to know—and I’ve been involved in enough to know over time—that you always gotta have a slush fund.”

“Yeah.”

“You can’t have gotten where I’ve gotten in my life at this point and
not know that sooner or later things come up that you gotta take care of, and you need a slush fund.”

Lackey asked to see a copy of the order that would send the Jones case to arbitration. Balducci produced the document, which he described as “pretty straight.” Then he laid an envelope containing $20,000 in cash on Lackey’s desk.

“Lord have mercy,” the judge exclaimed.

“You good for a couple more weeks, right?” Balducci asked. The $20,000 represented half of the payoff to Lackey. He believed it would keep Lackey’s debtors at bay until the remainder arrived.

“Let me ask you,” said Lackey, “aren’t no serial numbers or nothing traced on this doggone …”

“Absolutely not.”

Lackey fretted again over the situation. To calm him, Balducci said, “This is just business, Judge. You’re in a position to help me. I’m in a position to help you. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t help each other.”

The judge listened as Balducci explained there was no urgency to issue the order. Then he spoke quietly. “Tim, you’ve always been special to me.”

“I know, Judge. This doesn’t affect our friendship. It doesn’t affect the way I think of you and my fondness for you … It would break my heart if I knew that you were without options to get the help you needed,” Balducci said. “You taught me how to practice law as much as anybody, so I owe you a great debt of gratitude.”

Lackey felt it was necessary to bring up Scruggs’s name again. “Whenever you tell Mr. Scruggs. Or Dickie or whatever. Dick—whatever I should call him. I don’t know what I should call him. Don’t even know how old he is. I know I’m older than he is because I’m older than dirt. But you tell him this is a first-time venture for me.”

“He’s not even involved at that level, Judge,” Balducci said. “He’s not involved in a direct manner. Doesn’t want to be. Doesn’t need to be.”

Once again, it seemed as though an explicit connection to Scruggs was slipping away.

“Well, he’s a powerful fellow, I know.”

“He knows how things work,” Balducci agreed. “You don’t climb the mountain he’s climbed without cutting a corner here and there.”

“Yeah,” said the judge. “All right.”

“It will be fine because I will tell him, and he trusts me implicitly. Listen: this ain’t my first rodeo with Scruggs.”

·    ·    ·

    
Lackey had another entry for the journal the prosecutors wanted him to keep.

“As Tim walked out of the office,” he wrote, “I felt so forlorn and sad that our profession had come to this, that a young man of Tim’s ability would be this cowardly and stoop this low at the behest of scum he is trying to help just so he can add another dollar to his pile.”

    
Driving back to Oxford, Balducci got a call from Jim Biden. They talked about the two telephone calls they wanted Scruggs to make. In one, Scruggs would call Jim Biden and express his support for the Patterson, Balducci and Biden firm; ideally, he might even agree to have his name used on letterhead as an investor in joint ventures. Scruggs’s name carried clout, not only in the South, but also in Washington. In the other call, Balducci said he would ask Scruggs to vouch for the group with Gabor Ondo, a Swiss attorney who might be helpful in securing lucrative international deals.

“That would be absolutely perfect,” Jim Biden said.

    
Shortly before noon, as soon as Balducci left Scruggs’s office in Oxford, he called his partner. They had an extraordinary exchange. Some of the people who knew them felt they were an unlikely pair, the slightly built Balducci and the grossly overweight Patterson, a modern Mutt and Jeff. But in this talk, they delivered a low-comedy routine worthy of Abbott and Costello.

After Patterson answered the call, Balducci had an instruction.

“Repeat after me: You’re the man.”

“I’m the man.”

“No! I’M the man.”

“Oh, you the man?”

“I’m the man.”

“You the man.”

“I’m the man. Say it one more time.”

“You the man.”

“There you go.”

“You the man.”

“Say it like you mean it.”

“You the man!”

Balducci sounded exhilarated. “All right! Done! Handled! All is well!”

Patterson laughed. “What’s done? And what’s handled? And what’s ‘all is well’?”

“All of it,” Balducci shouted.

“There’s a lot to handle.”

“I know.”

“And there’s a lot that ain’t well,” Patterson said.

Balducci refused to be discouraged. “Well, what I can tell you is from this trip this morning, all is done and all is handled and all is well. Top to bottom. Soup to nuts.”

“Including Oxford?” Patterson asked.

“Yep. Everything.”

“Calls made?”

“Calls are made. Everything’s great. Follow-up has been done by me, just now, touching everybody.”

“Was he aware of what we were doing?” Patterson asked of Scruggs. “Could you tell if P.L. had talked to him?”

“I asked him, and he said P.L. had not talked to him. I said, well, he’s going to be giving you a call here soon.”

“Okay.”

Patterson asked about the two calls they wanted Scruggs to make. “Did he talk to Jimmy?” He was referring to Jim Biden.

“He left him a message. I was sitting right there and he left him the appropriate message. I mean, he took the pledge, put his foot on base. All nine yards.”

Balducci said he had just called Biden to tell him of Scruggs’s message.

Patterson wanted to know if Scruggs had talked to Ondo, the Swiss contact.

“He left him a message. I told Jimmy that he talked to him. But he actually left him a message.”

“Good enough,” Patterson said.

“Same thing.”

“You da man.”

“I’m the man.”

“You the man.”

Balducci said he would have lunch before heading back to New Albany. Patterson asked if he had heard yet from Zeke, the Texan with the money.

“Hadn’t heard from the motherfucker.”

    
The next afternoon, Patterson had a surprise visitor at his home. Joey Langston had been to see Scruggs earlier in the day and stopped
in New Albany on his way back to his own home in Booneville. The encounter developed into an awkward conversation between the successful lawyer and Patterson, his former associate.

Patterson sensed that Langston was fishing for something when his visitor said he was troubled that his one-time colleagues Patterson and Balducci might be working behind his back. It would be bad for everyone’s image, Langston said.

“Nobody’s going behind anybody’s back,” Patterson told him. “We’re all big boys and we can do business with whomever we want.” He confirmed that he and Balducci had a “done deal” with the Bidens and planned to open an office in Washington.

That was not comforting news to Langston. He considered himself a key Mississippi connection to Senator Biden, even though it was Patterson who had originally introduced Langston to Biden. But Langston didn’t want to betray his feelings, so he told Patterson, “That’s fine. Have at it. I think you ought to.”

The atmosphere at Patterson’s house was thick with treachery, and the distrust intensified when the telephone rang. Patterson’s wife, Debbie, answered. Both men could overhear her. “Oh, Mr. P.L., he’s in the middle of a meeting. I’ll have to let him call you back.”

Having no inkling that she should handle the call with discretion, she hung up and called to her husband: “Mr. P.L. says he just got out of that meeting you told him to have.”

Langston grinned. When he was in Oxford that morning, Scruggs had told him he was going to Birmingham later to see Blake, who had moved to the Alabama city. He wondered why Patterson had arranged the meeting between Scruggs and Blake. He worried that it was another instance of Patterson conniving behind his back, perhaps trying to sabotage Langston’s relationship with Scruggs.

Patterson shrugged off the call with a lie. It was some bullshit bit of business, he told Langston, involving help for somebody’s son-in-law.

Before Langston left, Patterson revealed a few more dimensions of the new firm of Patterson, Balducci and Biden. The information would give Patterson the appearance of leveling with his old boss, but it also had the effect of turning the knife. He told of contacts that had been made in Venezuela, and of an ambassador who was joining the team. “We’re fixing to have some pretty big announcements,” he said to Langston. “They’ll be getting a lot of attention. We plan to do all the national business we can do. Where we can use Dickie, we’re going to
use him. And where we can use you—if there’s something you want to bring to the table—we’ll use you, too. We’re going to all go make a lot of money, and if you want to do the same thing, then go to it.”

Langston nodded sadly at the changed dynamics. Patterson no longer worked for him. “I can’t do that without you,” he said.

“Well,” Patterson replied, “I ain’t there anymore.”

    
Although Patterson had promised Langston he would not tell Balducci about the conversation, he reported the details of their talk later in the day.

“The only thing Joey was saying was ‘I don’t want people thinking that we’re being deceitful to each other,’ ” Patterson told Balducci. “And I said, ‘Let me clear the air with you on that. I’ll tell you everything I know.’ And I did. Except I didn’t tell him you were going to Switzerland.” He laughed. Balducci was flying to Switzerland that weekend to try to tie up a contract with Gabor Ondo. Patterson added that Langston had said, “Please don’t tell Tim” about their talk.

“Yeah, he don’t want to piss me off so I don’t hurt him on MCI,” Balducci said, referring to the giant settlement Langston had helped win for the state. Balducci was still miffed over Langston’s failure to give him a respectable cut of the multimillion-dollar fee.

Patterson had another thought. “I think, if Langston could, he’d kill the deal with Gabor, and try to put it together himself.”

They speculated that Langston was also trying to wring information out of Jim Biden and the senator’s son Hunter Biden.

Balducci’s bitterness toward his former boss poured out. “I want Langston—if he hasn’t figured it out already—I want him to get the message and understand that if he tries to fuck us, that I’ll fuck him on MCI. The best thing for him to do is to get the fuck out of the way and shut up.”

    
That same afternoon, Scruggs made a short flight to Birmingham in his jet to see P. L. Blake. There were issues he needed to talk over. One involved the pending criminal contempt charge against Scruggs in federal court in Alabama. He wanted to learn the temperature of the courthouse crowd in Alabama, to see if fault lines were developing in Judge Acker’s action against him. Now that he lived in Alabama, Blake would know some of the right people. He could pass on intelligence to Scruggs. Blake was, after all, still being paid handsomely.

He and Blake met in a quiet room at the facility called the FBO, fixed base operation, by pilots flying private planes into the Birmingham airport. They had always been an odd pair, the debonair Scruggs and the gruff, laconic Blake, whose poor grammar spoke of the rural background he had never shed. Despite their differences, Scruggs enjoyed his conversations with Blake. In a way, their meetings were a throwback to Scruggs’s daring days as a navy pilot when he devised a method to hurtle through the air undetected by radar. Blake was a guy, Scruggs thought, who always flew below the radar. He knew Blake was unvarnished and that not all his activities were taken from the Boy Scout manual. But he realized that Blake was a valuable asset. He epitomized Scruggs’s vision of the dark side of the Force, and Scruggs always wanted these men on his side.